Archive for June 26th, 2014

McDaniel Freaks Out Over Cochran’s Black Voters Some National Republican leaders are cringing after Chris McDaniel followed his loss in the Mississippi GOP Senate primary with complaints about voting “irregularities” because some black Democrats crossed parties and voted for Sen. Thad Cochran. “The more the tea party complains about how black voters vote for Republicans, I think they look racist and stupid,” said GOP consultant John Feehery. “We’re trying to get black voters. Now that one of our candidates got black voters, we should be happy about it.” On election night, McDaniels refused to concede and told a crowd of his supporters, “There is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual, about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats.”

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10 Reasons Why Iraq’s Bloodbath Is Not W’s Fault Larry Elder, RealClearPolitics1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq “self-reliant and democratic,” and “a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process.” In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq “one of the great achievements of this administration.” Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force. 2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one…

Does Mary Burke Have What It Takes to Topple Scott Walker? Scott Conroy, RealClearPoliticsMARINETTE, Wis. — Mary Burke spends just about every waking hour these days focused on trying to become governor, but the Wisconsin Democrat admits to harboring a secondary goal as she campaigns around the state. The former business executive and state commerce secretary is running neck-and-neck with Republican Gov. Scott Walker. And if she is able to beat him in November, Burke could end the ambitious first-term governor’s likely 2016 presidential campaign before it even begins. “What we have seen here in the last 3½ years in Wisconsin under Scott Walker is the Tea Party…

GOP Poll, Not Its Policies, Gets Women’s Priorities Right Stephanie Schriock, RealClearPoliticsBig news. Republicans now have their own poll to tell them exactly what the rest of us have known for years — women care about the economy. Their poll says what all polls say. Women want their government to focus on helping them get a fair shot for their families: economic opportunity, health care, education – basically, the Democratic platform. When Democrats talk about “the Republican war on women” — no matter how hard the GOP tries not to understand — we mean a substantive series of policies that roll back the clock and decrease economic opportunity for women and…

Keeping Up With the Clintons Debra Saunders, RealClearPoliticsIt’s time to pass the hat for Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state has tried to distance herself from her weeks-ago assertion that after husband Bill left the White House, the couple were “dead broke.” She told PBS that the line was “inartful,” but only after she told a British paper that she does not count herself among the “truly well-off.” Nobody knows the troubles she’s seen. In the United Kingdom pushing her latest book — for which she received a reported eight-figure advance — Clinton told The Guardian that the Clintons should not be seen as out-of-touch swells: “We pay…

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The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated buffer zones around Massachusetts abortion clinics Thursday morning, in a ruling that held a Massachusetts law that effectively barred anti-choice activists from protesting less than 35 feet from a clinic was unconstitutional. The ruling was a blow for the reproductive rights community, but its outcome wasn’t a surprise to many.

The Massachusetts law was among the nation’s broadest in barring most individuals from standing less than 35 feet from an abortion clinic. As the court recognizes in McCullen v. Coakley, this law was instituted to protect the public health and safety of both patients and employees at the clinics, particularly from stalking and harassment that has turned violent in many instances. In Massachusetts, this violence included clinic shootings less than 20 years ago that killed 2 employees and wounded 5 others. Harassment and stalking around clinics can also dissuade many individuals from visiting clinics altogether.

But narrower laws in Colorado and a number of cities and localities could survive the majority’s relatively narrow ruling, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. While the four justices who wrote separate concurring opinions would take a hatchet to all restrictions surrounding abortion clinics, the five who signed onto the majority opinion applied a scalpel that may not necessarily affect many of the other existing laws.

“This really was very narrowly crafted to Massachusetts,” said National Abortion Federation President Vicki Saporta.

The court rejected the assertion of the four concurring justices. While these justices would have struck down Massachusetts’ law as inherently disfavoring anti-abortion speech, the five-justice majority held instead that the law could not punish such a broad swath of conduct.

“The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted inter­ests,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote for the majority, calling Massachusetts’ law “exceptional” among all 50 states (while also incorrectly suggesting that Massachusetts is the only state with a fixed buffer zone). To elaborate on this point, it cites several other laws that it presumably would uphold, seemingly because they punish particular types of conduct rather than barring everybody within a certain distance. Punishing “harassment,” for example, would be permissible. It cites as an example a New York City law that creates a protected zone of 15 feet, but specifically prohibits “follow[ing] and harass[ing]” another person within that protected distance. If it wanted to protect against physical violence, the court suggests it could pass a law similar to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 (FACE Act), which punishes ‘physical obstruction,” “injury,” and “intimidation.”

By the Guttmacher Institute’s count, there are at least 12 other cities whose buffer zone laws may be challenged in light of today’s ruling. But many other laws, including Colorado’s “bubble zone” law that prohibits individuals from getting within a certain distance of an abortion patient, are more specific about the types of conduct they prohibit, and thus might very well survive the Supreme Court’s new test.

Chicago’s “bubble zone” law, for example, bars individuals from getting closer than 8 feet to someone entering an abortion clinic with the intent of handing them a leaflet or speaking to them without their consent. It is unclear whether the court would deem this close enough to “harassment” or another harm the state is authorized to prevent. And it is unclear whether another similar law with a different sized buffer zone would survive scrutiny. But the Court is clear that it favors more specificity in these laws.

The Massachusetts law arose from a failed attempt at protecting abortion clinic patients and staff. In fact, Massachusetts used to have a narrower law that was deemed wholly ineffective. That law prohibited individuals from getting closer than six feet to a person entering an abortion clinic to counsel or persuade that person without their consent. But even police officials testified that this moving buffer zone, often known as a “floating” or “bubble” zone was nearly impossible to enforce, and that onerous crowds were collecting around the edges of the prohibited zone.

To better protect the safety of those inside the clinic, Massachusetts passed the 35-foot buffer zone. This new law prohibits anyone from entering that zone, with the exception of passersby, patients, employees, and law enforcement personnel. And advocates say it’s the only thing that’s worked. To address similar problems of chaos, violence, and harassment in its state, New Hampshire just last month passed a buffer zone law that establishes a smaller zone — 25 feet — but with very similar language.

While McCullen will prevent Massachusetts and other states from using what they have determined is the most effective means to protect people entering these clinics, one thing that is clear from the rhetoric of the four concurring justices is that this ruling is about as narrow as one could reasonably expect from the current U.S. Supreme Court. In one of the concurring opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented that even today’s ruling invalidating Massachusetts’ law on narrow grounds “carries forward this Court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”

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The Hollywood Liberal started in 2004 at the height of the Bush Administration madness in America.
We were inspired by the late great Bartcop.com. The very first thing I did when the site started was to get arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. My arrest at the start of a march from The World Trade Center was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. On New Years Eve 2014 the case was finally settled, with a judge awarding a class action suit that I was part of over $26 Million. I posted daily on the blog up until the end of The Bush error, and the site is now run as a history of the whole fiasco. Feel free to browse the old postings, pictures, & comics (an HL favorite) It reveals the twisted history of the times. Thanks H.L.